Does the phrase “world music” strike fear into your heart? The fear that you must purport to love it, as all good, well-rounded Weskids must do? Well, fear no more. Brave a few performances and you may just find the roots of that groove you love so well.
In the colonial atmosphere of Russell house yesterday afternoon, I sat waiting for the performance of Bamboo and Strings, a rare musical performance from Vietnam. This could have been an afternoon of forced appreciation for the complexity and authenticity of the music, but I found myself adoring a tinge of something soulful that sounded strangely familiar.
Ethnomusicologist and musician Phong Nguyen and David Badagnani played a repertoire of rare Vietnamese music at Russell House yesterday afternoon, largely to a crowd of music majors and professors.
Vietnamese music “bends” tones: the notes are pulled above or below the notes that Western culture expects. Phong Nyugen, one of the performers, explained that bending notes gives a particular mood or “color” to the music.
I became fonder of the music as it began to remind me of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album. I didn’t like it because it was familiar, but because it evoked the same thrill I feel when I hear a twinge of The Beatles’ music. The dan tranh zither is a 17-string instrument that sounds like wailing on an electric guitar with a wammy board. The buzz and rhythmic pulse used when playing the Broh bamboo lute was reminiscent of classic rock beats.
David Badagnani, whose abilities span wind, string, and percussion instruments, led a fusion piece of English Horn with Nguyen on the dan bau, a one-stringed but many-noted instrument. The dan bau is plucked at intervals on the string called harmonics, while bending the note with a vertical stick made of Water Buffalo horn. It sounded like a piece of classical music played by jazz musicians, using Vietnamese instruments and tones. Phong Nguyen, a world renowned Vietnamese musician and ethnomusicologist, led the performance by first teaching the audience about each instrument, and following that lesson with a song that demonstrated the instrument’s character. For example, the 13-stringed goong (the original spelling of “gong”) bamboo tube zither looks like a medivel torture instrument: a stick with wooden spikes coming out the end and half of a guord attached to the stick for resonation. This instrument was made to imitate the situation wherein each person played his or her own gong in a circle of gongs. With such a background given, one didn’t feel quite so awash in a sea of unknown music.
The structure of traditional Vietnamese music reflects this introduction to the unfamiliar: every song begins with a non-metric section of music, in order to give the listener an idea of the song’s atmosphere, and then it sinks into a rhythm and sings to the audience.
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